


Life Interrupted

by pie_is_good



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 09:13:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pie_is_good/pseuds/pie_is_good
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawkeye comes home from the war, and he's not quite as well-adjusted as he thought he'd be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life Interrupted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Re_White](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Re_White/gifts).



When the war ended, Hawkeye didn’t know what to do. He left behind a place he hated more than anything, but equally he left behind people he’d grown to love. As much as he hated to admit it, that place was home to him, now. He couldn’t remember what his bed back in Maine felt like or what it felt like to live in a room, with walls and solid doors and no one but his dad around.

He met up with friends he’d had before the war, but their lives had changed. So had his, if he was honest with himself, but he didn’t have a wife and kids sort of change, the way his friends did. 

It wasn’t long before he stopped seeing them.

He thought about contacting someone. Trapper was one of the closer ones, physically, but he hadn’t spoken to him since he’d left the camp. Charles, too, but he wasn’t exactly someone Hawkeye was looking to see again. Maybe the Colonel, or Radar...

Or BJ.

Within a week of being home, Hawkeye found himself starting to speak to BJ before realizing he wasn’t there in a bed next to him. He tried picking up the phone once, but when a voice answered, he froze. It wasn’t like him to freeze like that, but he couldn’t help it. Outside of war, he didn’t know how to talk to his best friend. That’s what they’d had in common, that’s how they’d grown so close, and now, there’s nothing to say.

Hawkeye drifted through life for several years, after that. He started a job as a surgeon in a hospital, slowly getting used to the way that real surgery differed from meatball surgery. Sometimes, he’d even get to see a patient again more than a few days post-surgery. He didn’t have dozens of operations to do as quickly as possible.

In the evenings, he drank too much gin. He’d grown so accustomed to the homegrown flavor of the still that It didn’t taste right to him, though he never once considered making his own again. Bottles would do.

He never realized that he had a problem, not until the day that he did something he swore he’d never do again. 

He was unable to operate on a patient, and the only reason was the liquor.

By that time, it had been five years since Korea, and he started to take an interest in his life and his work again, at least a little. A week later, he found himself at a medical conference in Chicago, and he spent the evenings at the bar.

The alcohol wasn’t going to leave him that easily, after all. Besides, he was here to mingle, right? To meet people, to learn things. Hawkeye ran his hand along the wooden bar, then his finger along the rim of his glass. He glanced up at the window, looking out onto Michigan Ave, when he noticed the reflection of a familiar face.

Hawkeye shook his head as if it would clear the image like an Etch-a-Sketch, but he was there.

“Hey, stranger,” the voice said.

Hawkeye turned around, slowly. There, in front of him, was BJ Hunnicut.

“How long have you been here?” Hawkeye asked.

“About thirty seconds. I’d have said hello sooner, but you looked very interested in your drink,” BJ said with a chuckle. “How have you been?”

“I’m doing okay,” Hawkeye said. “How is the family?”

“Oh, they’re great. You wouldn’t believe how big Erin is now,” BJ said, starting to reach for his wallet, but Hawkeye stood to get up.

“Excuse me,” he said, pushing past BJ. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Hawkeye walked down the hall of the hotel bar, past a few tables, and around the corner to the men’s room. He had considered going straight to his own room, but he wasn’t sure. The conversation was so wrong, so sterile, so not them. He almost wasn’t sure that it was his BJ out there, that it wasn’t someone else who thought he knew him.

Of course, it wasn’t his friend. It wasn’t. He knew that no friendship would be the same here as it was there, and the fact that he hadn’t once mentioned Korea since arriving back home on US soil had nothing to do with it.

Hawkeye stared at himself in the mirror, the dull lighting of a bar bathroom doing nothing to make the bags under his eyes, left there seemingly permanently at this point. He noticed his own eyes, the way that the spark they once had seemed gone. When he was younger, they’d been full of mischief and excitement and wonder, and now, nothing. 

“Are you okay, Hawk?”

Hawkeye hadn’t even heard BJ come in. BJ placed a hand on his shoulder, and Hawkeye made eye contact through the mirror before turning around.

“I missed you,” Hawkeye said. “I don’t know how to do life anymore, you know? This isn’t what I thought I’d be. I thought I’d be something better, someone more like you.”

“It’s awful presumptuous of you to think I’m so well-adjusted.” 

“Look at that smile,” Hawkeye said with a sharp laugh. “You’re doing just fine.”

“I always have that smile. This is my coping smile,” BJ said, though his face had grown more serious. “That’s why you’ve seen it so much.”

Hawkeye just looked down. Five years ago, he’d have a had a response to bring the smile right back to BJ’s face, but now he just wasn’t quite there. He was rusty, the same way he’d been with real surgery, with living in a home, with life.

“How long are you here for?”

“Here?” BJ asked. “I don’t plan on staying in this bathroom too long, personally. I don’t care for the decor.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“But I’m here for the conference, and...”

“And what?”

“And in two weeks, the family is moving to Vermont. I hope I’ll...see you around?” 

“Yeah,” Hawkeye said, leading the way out of the bathroom. “I will.”


End file.
